Category Archives: Iceland

Oh, Dad, I almost forgot. One night, while I was in Reykjavik, I went to dinner at a really nice, traditional Icelandic restaurant inside an old house. It was a linen tablecloth and waiters-in-ties kind of place, that specialized in local seafood. I didn’t have a reservation, so I had to wait for a bit for a table. The bar was in the attic, up a narrow, spiral staircase. The roof was pitched, so you couldn’t stand up all the way unless you were in the center of the room, and it was furnished with all this lovely, comfy, overstuffed furniture with lace doilies on the arms, like you’d see at your great aunt’s house. It was small and cozy and warm, and kind of dim in the candlelight. People were dressed nicely, sitting about sipping wine and cocktails, waiting for their tables for dinner downstairs.

There were no chairs available, so I squeezed in to a spot at the end of the big, blue velvet couch, next to an elegant elderly couple. I had a touch of a cold, and my throat was a bit sore, so when the waitress came, I asked her for my daddy’s tried-and-true Texas cowboy cough syrup: a double-shot of Jack and a sugarcube or two, with a good squeeze of lemon, which I swirled and warmed over the candle on the coffee table. Oh, so good when you’re feeling a little off. Goes down easy, and I don’t know if it really helps the cold, or if it just makes you not care about the sore throat, but either way, you end up feeling better, which is the goal. It was so good, I had another one.

The next thing I knew, the waitress was shaking my shoulder and saying “Miss, Miss…your table is ready downstairs.” I opened my eyes, and realized I was sprawled out across the couch, drooling and snoring like a pirate! I sat up with a snap, and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and looked around. The sweet, elegant elderly couple who had been sitting next to me were in chairs on the other side of the room — I had chased them away! Oh my god, how embarrassing! And clearly, as they were there before me, the restaurant had obviously bumped me to the head of the line, just to politely get me up and out of the bar and sobered up! Icelanders are very polite.

Well, far be it for me to refuse, so I just gathered myself up and slunk (it’s a word, I looked it up) out of the bar and downstairs to one of the best lobster dinners of my life. And no, the dinner waiter did not offer me the wine list. Haha! Just as well.

When I was in Alaska with my dad a couple weeks ago, and we were on that 12-hour train ride from Anchorage to Fairbanks, I was chatting with the people sitting across the aisle from us, and they asked if I had ever seen the Aurora Borealis before. I said no, but that I had tried to see them when I was in Iceland a few years ago, and they hadn’t cooperated. My dad perked up when I said that, and interrupted and said “You went to Iceland?” I said yes. Pause. Skeptical look from Dad. And then he exclaimed: “In your dreams!”

That’s right. My own dad called shenanigans on me.

Either he forgot about my Iceland trip, or maybe my mom just never told him where I was, I don’t know. But he didn’t believe me. So, Daddy, this one is for you.

Hallgrímskirkja in Reykjavik

A few years ago, I had to go to Germany for a memorial service for my German mom (the matriarch of the host family I lived with for a year when I was an exchange student in Germany in the 80s). At the time, Iceland Air flew between San Francisco and Frankfurt, and would let you do a stopover in Iceland for up to a week without charging you extra airfare. (They still do allow stopovers on the way to Europe, they just don’t fly out of SFO anymore.) So, I stopped in Reykjavik for a week.

Reykjavik

Iceland is groovy and strange. In the best possible way. There’s steam coming out of the ground everywhere, and glaciers on the horizon. Two-thirds of Iceland’s residents live in and around the city of Reykjavik, and they all believe in fairies, but they call them “hidden people.” They have hydrogen-fueled cars and buses that cut greenhouse emissions by over 50 percent.

The Pearl

There’s a revolving restaurant and a Viking wax museum–“The Pearl”–under a big, blue glass dome on top of some massive tanks that hold natural, geothermically heated water that heats the city’s buildings. How awesome is that?

There’s a really vibrant art scene that is weird and wonderful, if a little dark. There’s a kind of a seafaring-depression-disembodied-baby-appendage theme happening, that takes a few days and more than a little alcohol to get used to.

Scary baby arms and legs coming out of balls of spider webs–the stuff of nightmares!

Sólfar, or Sun Voyager

The bus stoppa here

The people of Iceland are all on a first name basis. They even refer to the president of the country by his first name. To be fair, the population of the whole country is about a third of San Francisco’s, so they might actually all know each other. But really, it’s because Iceland’s culture has a naming convention that indicates the immediate father–and nowadays, sometimes the mother–of the person, rather than the family lineage name.

I don’t know what those little donutty knot thingies are called, but they were delicious and I ate more of them than I am proud of

So, a person’s last name is their father’s first name as the prefix, and the word “son” or “daughter” as the suffix. So, for example, because my aforementioned dad’s name is Henry, my name would be Quin Henrysdaughter, or in Icelandic, Henrysdottir. If my mom, whose name was Carole, had been a single mother, I’d have been Quin Carolesdottir, if she was a feminist and didn’t want to follow the traditional patronymic convention. If I had a brother named, oh, say, Theotis, his name would be Theotis Henrysson or Carolesson. Get it? Okay, so, since that is not especially helpful in identifying people by family line, and since so many people have the same first names, folks just kind of go by their first names in Iceland and leave it at that. I kinda love that.

The music scene is epic. It’s not all Björk and Sigur Rós–not that there’s anything wrong with either of them, I love them both. But if you want to go sample some really unique, indie musicians, who aren’t imitating whoever the last big thing was, go to Reykjavik, preferably during one of their music festivals. There are several, including “Dark Days” during January, when the sun never comes up. Which explains why some of it sounds like this:

I discovered that little gem by giving a music store clerk my American Express card and telling him to pick out six cd’s for me that represented the latest from the local music scene, and he gave me this one by Mugi Mugison (so, if you recall, that means Mugi’s dad was named Mugi, too). Don’t feel too bad for me, though, because that clerk also introduced me to Emiliana Torrini long before she broke out internationally, and the group Leaves, who are eery and dreamy and lovely and always put me in the mood to make soup (I would post a video for you, but all the videos I can find are geographically blocked. If you want to have a listen, start with the album “The Angela Test,” if you can find it).

The steam coming out of the ground that I mentioned before? Not kidding even a little bit. It’s everywhere. Spurts, geysers and clouds of the oh-so-fresh-smelling stuff (note sarcastic tone).

Steam coming out of the ground

The locals pile up the rocks in these formations to mark where “the hidden people” live, so others will know not to bother them

There’s a big geothermic power plant outside Reykjavic, and the runoff from the plant sifts through the volcanic rock of the Reykjanes Peninsula, and bubbles up to form a hot springs lake called Bláa lónið, or Blue Lagoon. The water is about 100 degrees Fahrenheit and is very rich in silica, which clouds the water and forms a thick, silky, white coating on the sharp lava surface. It feels kind of like bathtub caulk to the touch, but you can scoop it up and smear it all over your face and body. Which people do.

Bláa lónið, or Blue Lagoon

They go there specifically to cover themselves in that muck, and let it dry to chalk on their skin. There is even a skin clinic at Blue Lagoon, as the silica mud is supposed to be great for psoriasis and such. I don’t know about that, but I can tell you, that weird, milky blue lake was ethereal and spooky, and I had to soak in it until I turned into a prune. It was seriously one of my favorite parts of the trip. They have massage therapists who will come out into the lake with floaty rafts for you to lie on, and massage you in the water. Oh, and the hot dogs at the snack bar were ridiculously good–they put those crunchy french fried onions on them and stick it down with curry ketchup (trust me, it was better than its sounds). But, really, the best place to get those special Reykjavik hot dogs with the crunchy onions is a little kiosk down by the docks. I kid you not, the line at that place at midnight is so long, you’ll kick yourself for not buying two when you finally get to the window, because when you taste how amazing they are, you’ll have to get back in that line. That made more sense in my head, sorry. The hot dogs are good, okay? Really good. But I digress….

Thingvellir

Outside Reykjavik, icy, crystal clear rivers and streams runoff from glaciers and cut through a vast, open plain where the site of the first Viking congress at Thingvellir is preserved. The ground opens up to give way to the veils of a giant waterfall that falls down, into the earth, instead of off of a bluff above. The crater of a live volcano forms a punchbowl for a preternaturally marble green lake. It’s a land of incomparable and curious beauty.

Iceland’s heavy volcanic activity is due its location right on the mid-Atlantic Ridge, where the European continental plate meets the North American continental plate. The plates are spreading apart, and new earth is literally bulging up from the crack.

The crack between the European and the American Continental Plates

You can walk over a rickety bridge from one continent to the other. The day I was there, the bridge had a camouflage net over it, because Clint Eastwood was filming “Flags of our Fathers” on the beach, and they couldn’t very well have me in my purple and green coat and giant blonde pony tail skipping across a white bridge in the background of what was supposed to be World War II Iwo Jima. Although, in my humble opinion, that movie could only have benefitted from a scene like that. Just sayin’. Whatever.

I still crawled over the bridge on all fours, though, just so I could say I crossed a bridge between the continents. Now that I think of it, I’m going to have to watch that extremely long movie again, and keep an eye out for that bridge. Just in case. You never know! At least, this time, I can watch it on video, so I can pause it and go to the Snyrtingar.